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"When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad."
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"Nothing humbles a beautiful woman better than not being wanted by a man whose girlfriend or wife is ugly (or not as beautiful as she is)."

"Your mindset serves as the operating system for your entire life's experience."

"A poor but confident man is as hard to find as a rich but shy man."

"Saying that you do not remember something or someone is a less embarrassing or hurtful way of saying that you do not know it or them anymore."

"We are not as important to most people as we are to ourselves. As a matter of fact, we are-to most people-not important at all."

"To say your mindset is critical to your success is a gross understatement-it is the underpinning!"

"People's behaviors are messages, not a diagnosis because I can no longer discern the world's version of insanity."

"Instead of breaking or cherry-picking the rules, many just follow the inner rules, which have been instilled during their lifetime and have subtly permeated their thinking. They value rules, as it offers the ravishment of a securing, ceremonial rhythm in life and it prevents them from breaking free from their cocoon, all the more because freedom can be so scaring and exhausting. ['When forgetting the rules of the game']"

"As long as I didn't say it aloud, it wasn't real."

"It is a great mystery to me how the problems of others seem like simple arithmetic while my own appear as complicated as a calculus equation."
Explore more quotes by Nick Hornby

"I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!"

"We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?"

"He's a sweet man whose crime was that he didn't love me quite enough, and because this wasn't much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones."

"I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path."

"I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will."

"No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there's always something to be learned. It's just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you're pootling about. But what can you do about it? We don't choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down."

"I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all."

"A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool."
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